Favorites of the Moon Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.5

Favorites of the Moon Blu-ray Movie Review

Sheer lunacy.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman August 13, 2014

Films as disparate as Anthony Mann’s 1950 western Winchester 73 and Anthony Asquith’s 1964 compilation of vignettes The Yellow Rolls Royce have exploited the conceit of an object uniting various characters and/or storylines. Even something as mundane as the old ABC portmanteau sitcom Love, American Style attempted to knit its episodes together by the regular appearance of a big brass bed in the various stories. And so it really shouldn’t seem that revolutionary for expat Soviet director Otar Iosseliani to utilize much the same technique in the somewhat baffling and extremely anecdotal Favorites of the Moon, a 1984 opus which received the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in a year that also saw the fête screen Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (out of competition) and dedicate its retrospective to Luis Buñuel. Fans of the Spanish surrealist probably felt more at home with Iosseliani’s efforts than those pumped up on adrenaline by Spielberg’s homage to serials of yore, for as might be inferred from the title, Favorites of the Moon offers a lunatic assortment of characters, many of whom would have been right at home in such Buñuel efforts as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. And despite the technique of items or objects being used as an anchoring device having been a cinematic trope of sorts for years before Favorites of the Moon beamed down, Iosseliani takes a completely different tack than many (if not most) other filmmakers who have sought to knit together a story this way. In the two examples cited above, the objects, whether a rifle or a luxury motorcar, are mere props, objects which are there and which motivate certain actions but which frankly are only devices to introduce us to characters and their stories. The narrative flow of both Winchester 73 and The Yellow Rolls Royce is therefore really rather traditional when divorced from the conceit of a unifying object transferring from one character to the next. Favorites of the Moon doesn’t really seem to care much about its characters, at least not in the way films usually do. In fact, in this film it’s almost as if the characters are props, and the two objects—a set of 18th century china and a 19th century nude painting—are what Iosseliani wants us to establish a rapport with.

While the idea of objects as a focal point of entry into various stories may not be revolutionary, it’s another kind of revolution that seems to inform Iosseliani’s opaque film, at least by implication. Iosseliani gives the viewer brief vignettes of a supposedly rosy past when the landed gentry delighted in such luxuries as hand painted dinnerware or specially commissioned pieces of art. But even in the past, there are intimations of disaster and change in store. In a recurring motif that seems to suggest epochal societal changes, various animals burst into tony environments, causing catastrophe, not the least of which is broken china. Will the accepted social order also be privy to such destruction?

That seems to be the clear subtext once Iosseliani starts drifting in and out of various lives in a contemporary Paris. These characters, none of whom are introduced in any traditional way (and about whom we know very much as the film progresses), tend to be resolutely bourgeois or even “worse”, vagrants, scoundrels, thieves and denizens of the world’s “oldest profession”. But Iosseliani is not a social critic in any traditional sense. He doesn’t skewer these middle class personages the way that Buñuel preferred to do. Instead, he merely observes their often peculiar behaviors, letting those behaviors speak for themselves. In other words, we might still have a patently middle class dinner party here as in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeosie, and there might even be a similar philosophical hogwash being banded about, not to mention subterfuge or outright illegal acts being fomented, but the participants here are not seated on toilets.

One of the great pleasures (at least in the early going) of television’s epochal Lost was discovering how the various characters had been interrelated (sometimes for years) without being ostensibly aware of those connections themselves. One character might pop up on an evening newscast in the background as another was going about his or her business, and the like, with the none too subtle implication that “we’re all one”, whether we’re aware of it or not. There’s much the same feeling wafting through Favorites of the Moon, though it’s handled perhaps even more discursively than in the television series. Slowly we begin to realize that many of the characters drifting in and out of the film have cross connections, though few are ever discussed overtly and it’s left to the viewer to divine how everyone ties into everyone else.

The peripatetic quality of the storytelling here might seem to suggest that only the items have any stability, but the idea of “object permanence” (not to be too coy about it) ultimately is as much of an illusion as anything else in Favorites of the Moon. Whether china is (repeatedly) smashed or paintings get cut out of their frames in a theft, Iosseliani seems to be telling us that any nostalgia we mere humans have for times past (as exemplified by the objects themselves) is at best a misplaced emotion. Instead we’re left to ponder the enigma of unending change. Class structure and the seemingly inexorable destruction of a patrician sensibility may only be the most obvious example Iosseliani gives here (especially in the quite notable demolishing of what appears to be a noble's estate toward the end of the film), but he seems to be making a more generalist point about a Heraclitean universe where nothing can be experienced in the same way twice. That quandary will mean that many will find Favorites of the Moon too intentionally impenetrable to fathom. Others may find the presentation here at the very least intriguing, if not emotionally compelling. The moon supposedly sways the feelings of humans just as inexorably as it moves the tides, but perhaps Iosseliani is making the point that it affects the intellect as well.

Favorites of the Moon Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Favorites of the Moon is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cohen Film Collection with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.67:1. The elements used for this transfer are in very good condition, and there's abundant clarity here given the understanding that Iosseliani used a fairly gritty looking film stock. Colors seemed just slightly red tinged to me at times, giving a slighly pink cast to flesh tones, but this was a variable anomaly and for the most part, things look accurate and nicely saturated. Perhaps not so coincidentally, reds and blues are especially vibrant here (look at the sequences of the band filming their appearance for some especially well saturated tones). Contrast is excellent, though Ioselliani seems to have shot in natural light quite a bit of the time, and so shadow detail can be somewhat minimal. Flashbacks are in black and white (see screenshot 7), and feature excellent contrast with good black levels. Grain is quite natural looking, though as mentioned above, gives a somewhat coarse look to the presentation, especially in darker sequences. There are no compression artifacts or other problems to report.

Favorites of the Moon Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Favorites of the Moon features an uncompressed LPCM 2.0 mono track in the original French. (Some online sources are claiming this film is in Italian, but unless my ears have suddenly gotten very bad, that's incorrect.) The mix here is not overly aggressive, and in fact large swaths of the film pass by with no dialogue whatsoever, just good ambient environmental noise and occasional underscore cues. Everything is clear and well defined, and there's actually some great depth to the mix. Listen for example when the little kids are watching the rock group on television how you can clearly hear the sounds of them eating emanating from the general cacophony of the broadcast. Fidelity is excellent and there are no issues of any kind to report.

Favorites of the Moon Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Feature Length Audio Commentary by Critic Phillip Lapote. This is a very entertaining commentary, though Lapote occasionally has the tendency to interrupt his flow of analysis or description with odd little sidebars. Even Lapote seems hesitant to discuss what everything "means", but he does a good job of speaking about the characters and various interrelationships.


• 2014 Re-release Trailer (1080p; 1:41)

Favorites of the Moon Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There's a great moment on the audio commentary of Belle de jour where Michael Wood quite wisely states that if you don't understand something in a Buñuel film, it's probably because the master filmmaker didn't want you to understand—he is trying to circumvent your intellect. There's something similar if not identical at work in Favorites of the Moon, though Ioselliani is certainly more typically "rational" than the surrealist Spaniard. And indeed rather than subverting the intellect, Ioselliani almost wants to burden it with so much extraneous information that it simply collapses, much like the upper classes depicted in the film in flashbacks. Favorites of the Moon is almost intentionally off-putting at times, but for those up to the challenge, it offers a really unique stance, one that certainly seems to suggest repeated viewings are in order. Technical merits here are strong, and Favorites of the Moon comes Recommended.